My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.
2005-10-11
Radio Debate--TKO
I heard an on-air debate today on the Caplis and Silverman Show on 630KHOW between Douglas Bruce and State Senator Ken Gordon (D). I was unable to hear the whole thing, but I did catch about 45 minutes of it.
And, were I a ringside judge, I would have scored it a TKO in about the fourth round. The most important thing I heard was Bruce backing the Senator into admitting that Referenda C and D ARE, in fact, a tax increase.
There's a clip that should get an awful lot of ad play in the last four weeks.
And you know those ads that say the cost will be only a few hundred per family--because it says so right in the blue book! Turns out that that figure quoted, and printed in the blue book, applies only to the sales tax portion of the refunds. Of course, there are other kinds of taxes in Colorado.
Silverman hammered away with this question: isn't it fundamentally deceptive of the supporters of C & D to fall back on numbers that don't add up and to disguise the real cost and possible uses of this money?
Me, personally, I'm waiting for this ad:
The legislature is asking voters to approve a waiver of certain provisions of the Taxpayers' Bill of Rights. They say this waiver is necessary to guarantee the continuation of many state services.
They say the amount of money that they need is $3.7 billion.
What they don't say is that state budget analysts have placed the actual budgetary shortfall at closer to $1 billion.
What they also don't say is why they want the extra $2.7 billion.
What else they are conspicuously avoiding talking about is the fundamental strength of the Colorado economy, as indicated by an unemployment rate of 5.1%, a job growth of 80,000 jobs per month over the past three months [okay, so I don't have actual numbers at my fingertips, but you get the idea], and a constant growth of state revenues. In other words, the economy under TABOR is recovering very nicely.
So . . . .
Do you really think it's okay to give government a $3.7 billion dollar solution to a $1 billion problem?
Really?
I'm not holding my breath to see this ad, of course. But for me, this does boil down to that one little problem.
I'm not in denial that certain provisions of TABOR have hamstrung the state government to some degree. And, perhaps, a little tweaking is a good thing.
But not this particular tweak. | |
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